This invention is an improvement over the disclosures in application Ser. Nos. 11/350,314 and 11/904,208, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference.
As explained in these applications, a development is underway in the handling of seed cotton from the time it is picked until it enters a gin. In the recent past, seed cotton from a picker is dumped into a module builder on the edge of a field. The cotton is tamped in the module builder until a large rectangular module is created which is ultimately unloaded from the module builder. A plastic cover is draped over the module and the covered module sits in the field until it is moved by a special truck to a gin yard where the module sits until it is ginned. In order to minimize water and other damage to the seed cotton before it enters the gin, there has been developed a cotton picker that creates plastic wrapped round or cylindrical modules. Because these modules are wrapped in plastic, no water wicks up from the ground to damage the seed cotton and rain does not seep through holes developed in conventional tarp covered modules.
In these above patent applications, there is disclosed a gantry on which the plastic removal devices are mounted and this gantry is mounted for movement toward and away from a disperser where the cotton module is disintegrated into clumps which can be handled by the gin. Moving the gantry is done in an attempt to abut the modules end to end, or nearly so, when the plastic has been removed from the modules. The purpose is to eliminate or minimize any gap between successive modules so the disperser, and thus the gin, is never starved of cotton. This is particularly true for cotton gins which do not have a feed controller between the module feeder and the gin. Although only about 20% of cotton gins do not have feed controllers, installing a feed controller is no small chore because, at current prices, they are about $180,000 installed.